“It’s better this way,” says Torrijos, relieved. They’ve saved him the disagreeable task of blowing up the canal and all its installations.
(154)
1979: Madrid
Intruders Disturb the Quiet Ingestion of the Body of God
In a big church in Madrid, a special Mass celebrates the anniversary of Argentine independence. Diplomats, business executives, and military men have been invited by General Leandro Anaya, ambassador of the dictatorship which is so busy across the sea protecting the Argentine heritage of fatherland, faith, and other proprieties.
Through the stained-glass windows rich lights illumine the faces and fashions of the ladies and gentlemen. On Sundays like this, God is worthy of confidence. Very occasionally a timid cough decorates the silence, as the priest performs the rite: imperturbable silence of eternity, eternity of the Lord’s elect.
The moment of communion comes. Ringed by bodyguards, the Argentine ambassador approaches the altar. He kneels, closes his eyes, opens his mouth. Instantly the flutter of white handkerchiefs unfurling, covering the heads of the women who walk up the aisles, all the aisles. The mothers of the Plaza de Mayo advance softly, cottony rustle, until they surround the bodyguards who surround the ambassador. Then they stare at him. Simply stare. The ambassador opens his eyes, looks at all these women looking at him without blinking, and swallows his saliva, while the priest’s hand remains paralyzed in midair, the Host between his fingers.
The whole church is filled with these women. Suddenly there are no longer saints or merchants in this temple, nothing more than a multitude of uninvited women: black dresses, white handkerchiefs, all silent, all on their feet.
(173)
1979: New York
Banker Rockefeller Congratulates Dictator Videla
His Excellency Jorge Rafael Videla
President of Argentina
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Dear Mr. President,
I am very grateful to you for taking time to receive me during my recent visit to Argentina. Not having been there for seven years, it was encouraging to see what progress your government has made during the past three years, both in controlling terrorism and strengthening the economy. I congratulate you on what you have achieved and wish you every success for the future …
With warm good wishes,
Sincerely,
David Rockefeller
(384)
1979: Siuna
Portrait of a Nicaraguan Worker
José Villarreina, married, three children. Works for the North American company Rosario Mines, which seventy years ago overthrew President Zelaya. Since 1952, Villarreina has been scraping gold from the excavations at Siuna; even so, his lungs are not yet entirely rotted out.
At 1:30 P.M. on July 3, 1979, Villarreina looks out from one of the mineshafts and a mineral-loaded cart tears off his head. Thirty-five minutes later, the company notifies the dead man that in accordance with articles 18, 115, and 119 of the Labor Code, he is discharged for nonfulfillment of his contract.
(362)
1979: In All Nicaragua
The Earth Buckles
and shakes worse than in all the earthquakes put together. Airplanes fly over immense stretches of jungle dropping napalm, and bomb cities crisscrossed with barricades and trenches. The Sandinistas take over León, Masaya, Jinotega, Chinandega, Estelí, Carazo, Jinotepe …
While Somoza awaits a sixty-five-million-dollar loan, approved by the International Monetary Fund, in Nicaragua they fight tree by tree, house by house. With masks or handkerchiefs covering their faces, the youths attack with rifles or machetes, sticks or stones; even a toy gun serves to make an impression.
In Masaya, which in the language of the Indians means city that burns, the fighters, adept in pyrotechnics, turn drainpipes into mortars and invent a fuseless contact bomb which explodes on striking. Old women weave between the bullets carrying large bags full of bombs, which they hand around like loaves of bread.
(10, 238, 239, and 320)
1979: In All Nicaragua
Get It Together Eyeryone,
don’t lose it, the big one is here, the shit has hit the fan, hell has broken loose, we’re at fever heat, fighting with nothing but a homemade arsenal against tanks, armored cars, and planes, so everyone get into it, from here on no one ducks out, it’s our war, the real thing, if you don’t die killing you’ll die dying, shoulder to shoulder makes us bolder, all together now, the people is us.
(10, 238, and 239)
From the Datebook of Tachito Somoza
1979
Thursday, July 12,
Love
1979: Managua
“Tourism must be stimulated,”
orders the dictator while Managua’s eastern barrios burn, set ablaze by the air force.
From his bunker, great steel and cement uterus, Somoza rules. Here nothing penetrates, not the thunder of bombs, not the screams of people, nothing to ruffle the perfect silence. Here one sees nothing, smells nothing. In this bunker Somoza has lived for some time, right in the center of Managua but about as far from Nicaragua as you can get; and in this bunker, he now sits down with Fausto Amador.
Fausto Amador is the father of Carlos Fonseca Amador. The son, founder of the Sandinista Front, understood patriotism; the father, administrator general for the richest man in Central America, understands patrimony.
Surrounded by mirrors and plastic flowers, seated before a computer, Somoza, with Fausto Amador’s help, organizes the liquidation of his businesses, which means the total pillage of Nicaragua.
Afterward, Somoza says on the telephone: “I’m not going and they’re not throwing me out.”
(10, 320, and 460)
1979: Managua
Somoza’s Grandson
They’re throwing him out and he’s going. At dawn, Somoza boards a plane for Miami. In these final days the United States abandons him, but he does not abandon the United States: “In my heart, I will always be part of this great nation.”
Somoza takes with him the gold ingots of the Central Bank, eight brightly colored parrots, and the coffins of his father and brother. He also takes the living body of the crown prince.
Anastasio Somoza Portocarrero, grandson of the founder of the dynasty, is a corpulent military man who has learned the arts of command and good government in the United States. In Nicaragua, he founded, and until today directed, the Basic Infantry Training School, a juvenile army group specializing in interrogations of prisoners—and famous for its skill. Armed with pincers and spoons, these lads can tear out fingernails without breaking the roots and eyes without injuring the lids.
The Somoza clan goes into exile as Augusto César Sandino strolls through Nicaragua beneath a rain of flowers, a half century after they shot him. This country has gone mad; lead floats, cork sinks, the dead escape from the cemetery, and women from the kitchen.
(10, 322, and 460)
1979: Granada
The Comandantes
Behind them, an abyss. Ahead and to either side, an armed people on the attack. La Pólvora barracks in the city of Granada, last stronghold of the dictatorship, is falling.
When the colonel in command hears of Somoza’s flight, he orders the machineguns silenced. The Sandinistas also stop firing.
Soon the iron gate of the barracks opens and the colonel appears, waving a white rag. “Don’t fire.”
The colonel crosses the street. “I want to talk to the comandante.”
A kerchief covering one of the faces drops. “I’m the comandante,” says Mónica Bajtodano, one of the Sandinista women who lead troops.
“What?”
Through the mouth of the colonel, this haughty macho, speaks the military institution, defeated but dignified. Virility of the pants, honor of the uniform. “I don’t surrender to a woman!” roars the colonel.
And he surrenders.
1979: In All Nicaragua
Birth
The Nicaragua newly bor
n in the rubble is only a few hours old, fresh new greenery among the looted ruins of war; and the singing light of the first day of Creation fills the air that smells of fire.
1979: Paris
Darcy
The Sorbonne confers the title of Doctor Honoris Causa on Darcy Ribeiro. He accepts, he says, on the merit of his failures.
Darcy has failed as an anthropologist, because the Indians of Brazil are still being annihilated. He has failed as rector of the university because the reality he wanted it to transform proved obdurate. He has failed as Minister of Education in a country where illiteracy never stops multiplying. He has failed as a member of a government that tried and failed either to make agrarian reform or to control the cannibalistic habits of foreign capital. He has failed as a writer who dreamed of forbidding history to repeat itself.
These are his failures. These are his dignities.
(376)
1979: Santiago de Chile
Stubborn Faith
General Pinochet stamps his signature on a decree that imposes private property on the Mapuche Indians. The government offers funds, fencing, and seeds to those who agree to parcel out their communities with good grace. If not, the government warns, they’ll accept without any grace.
Pinochet is not the first to believe that greed is part of human nature and that God wants it that way. Long ago, the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia had tried to break up the indigenous communities of Chile. Since then, by fire and sword everything has been seized from the Indians, everything: land, language, religion, customs. But the Indians, hemmed in, trapped in poverty, exhausted by so much war and so much swindling, persist in believing that the world is a shared home.
1979: Chajul
Another Kind of Political Education in Guatemala
Patrocinio Menchú, Maya-Quiché Indian, born in the village of Chimel, had, along with his parents, defended the lands of his harassed community. From his parents he learned to walk the heights without slipping, to greet the sun according to ancient custom, to clear and fertilize the ground, and to stake his life on it.
Now, he is one of the prisoners that the army trucks have brought to the village of Chajul for the people to see. Rigoberta, his sister, recognizes him, although his face is swollen from beatings and he bleeds from his eyes, his tongueless mouth, and his nail-less fingers.
Five hundred soldiers—Indians too, Indians of other regions—stand guard over the ceremony. Herded into a circle, the whole population of Chajul is forced to watch. Rigoberta has to watch, while within her, as in everyone, a silent, moist curse blooms. The captain displays the nude bodies, flayed, mutilated, still alive, and says that these are Cubans who have come to stir up trouble in Guatemala. Showing off the details of the punishments that each one earned, the captain yells:
“Have a good look at what’s in store for guerrillas!”
Then he soaks the prisoners with gasoline and sets fire to them.
Patrocinio Menchú was still tender corn. It was only sixteen years ago that he was planted.
(72)
The Mayas Plant Each Child That Is Born
High up in the mountains, the Indians of Guatemala bury the umbilical cord while presenting the child to Grandpa Volcano, Mother Earth, Father Sun, Grandma Moon, all the powerful grandparents, and asking them to protect the newly born from danger and error.
Before the rain that irrigates us and before the wind that bears us witness, we, who are part of you, plant this new child, this new compañero, in this place …
1980: La Paz
The Cococracy
General Luis García Meza, author of the 189th coup d’état in a century and a half of Bolivia’s history, announces that he will establish a free economy, as in Chile, and make sure all extremists disappear, as in Argentina.
With García Meza, the cocaine traffickers take over the state. His brand-new Interior Minister, Colonel Luis Arce Gómez, divides his time and energy between drug smuggling and heading up the Bolivian Section of the World Anticommunist League. He will not rest, he says, never rest, until the cancer of Marxism is extirpated.
The military government raises the curtain by assassinating Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, enemy of Gulf Oil and its forty thieves, implacable foe of hidden filth.
(157 and 257)
1980: Santa Ana de Yacuma
Portrait of a Modern Businessman
He fires from the hip, both bullets and bribes. At his waist he carries a golden pistol, in his mouth a golden smile. His bodyguards use machineguns with telescopic sights. He has twelve missile-armed combat planes and thirty cargo planes that take off early each morning from the Bolivian jungle loaded with cocaine paste. Roberto Suárez, cousin and colleague of the new Interior Minister, exports a ton a month.
“My philosophy,” he says, “is to do good.”
He claims that the money he has given to the Bolivian military would suffice to pay the country’s external debt.
Like a good Latin American businessman, Suárez sends his winnings to Switzerland, where they find refuge in banking secrecy. But in Santa Ana de Yacuma, the town where he was born, he has paved the main street, restored the church, and given sewing machines to widows and orphans; and when he turns up there he bets thousands of dollars on a roll of the dice or a cockfight.
Suárez is the most important Bolivian capitalist in a huge multinational enterprise. In his hands, the price of a coca leaf is multiplied by ten as it changes into paste and leaves the country. Later, as it becomes powder and reaches the nose that inhales it, its price soars two hundred times. Like any raw material from a poor country, coca lines the pockets of intermediaries, and above all intermediaries in the rich country that consumes it transformed into cocaine, the white goddess.
(157, 257, and 439)
The White Goddess
is the most expensive of the divinities. She costs five times as much as gold. In the United States, ten million devotees yearn and burn, ready to kill, and kill themselves for her. Every year they throw thirty billion dollars at the foot of her shining altar of pure snow. In the long run she will annihilate them; from the start she steals their souls; but in exchange she offers to make them, by her good grace, supermen for a moment.
(257 and 372)
1980: Santa Marta
Marijuana
Out of each dollar of dreams that a U.S. marijuana smoker buys, barely one cent reaches the hands of the Colombian campesinos who grow it. The other ninety-nine cents go to the traffickers, who in Colombia have fifteen hundred airports, five hundred airplanes, and a hundred ships.
On the outskirts of Medellín or Santa Marta, the drug mafiosi live in ostentatious mansions. In front they like to display on granite pedestals the small planes they used in their first operation. They rock their children in gold cradles, give golden fingernails to their lovers, and on ring finger or necktie wear diamonds as discreet as headlights.
The mafiosi habitually fumigate their forces. Four years ago they machinegunned Lucho Barranquilla, most popular of the traffickers, on a street corner in the city of Santa Marta. The murderers sent to the funeral a floral wreath in the form of a heart and took up a collection to erect a statue of the departed in the main plaza.
(95 and 406)
1980: Santa Marta
Saint Agatón
Lucho Barranquilla was widely mourned. The children who played in his amusement park wept for him, as did the widows and orphans he protected, and the cops who ate from his hand. In fact, the whole city of Santa Marta, which lived thanks to his loans and donations, wept. And Saint Agatón wept for him, too.
Saint Agatón is the patron saint of drunkards. On Carnival Sunday, drunks from the whole Colombian coast descend on the village of Mamatoco, on Santa Marta’s outskirts. There they take Saint Agatón out of his church and parade him, singing dirty songs and spraying him with firewater, just the way he likes.
But what the drunks are parading is only a white-bearded impostor brought from Spain. The true S
aint Agatón, who had an Indian face and a straw hat, was kidnapped half a century ago by a temperance priest who fled with the saint under his surplice. God punished that priest with leprosy and crossed the eyes of the sacristan who accompanied him, but left the real Saint Agatón hidden in the remote village of Sucre.
A committee has gone to Sucre in recent days to plead with him to return: “Since you left,” they tell him, “there’s no more miracles or fun.”
Saint Agatón refuses. He says he won’t go back to Santa Marta, because there they killed his friend Lucho Barranquilla.
1980: Guatemala City
Newsreel
It was General Romeo Lucas García, president of Guatemala, who gave the order to set fire to the Spanish embassy with its occupants inside. This statement comes from Elías Barahona, official spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior, who calls a press conference after seeking asylum in Panama.
According to Barahona, General Lucas García is personally responsible for the deaths of the thirty-nine persons roasted alive by the police bombs. Among the victims were twenty-seven Indian leaders who had peacefully occupied the embassy to denounce the massacres in the Quiché region.
Barahona also states that General Lucas García commands the paramilitary and parapolice bands known as the Squadrons of Death, and helps draw up the lists of opponents condemned to disappear.
The former press secretary of the Interior Ministry claims that in Guatemala a “Program of Pacification and Eradication of Communism” is being carried out, based on a four-hundred-and-twenty-page document drawn up by specialists in the United States on the basis of their experience in the Vietnam war.
Century of the Wind Page 27
